Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!ucsd!ucbvax!hplabs!pyramid!infmx!cortesi
From: cortesi@infmx.UUCP (David Cortesi)
Newsgroups: comp.text.desktop
Subject: Re: Self-Publishing
Message-ID: <2737@infmx.UUCP>
Date: 1 Dec 89 01:14:49 GMT
References: <25160001@hpcvia.CV.HP.COM> <25160003@hpcvia.CV.HP.COM>
Reply-To: cortesi@infmx.UUCP (David Cortesi)
Distribution: na
Organization: Informix, Menlo Park, Ca. U.S.A.
Lines: 21

In article <25160003@hpcvia.CV.HP.COM> 10e@hpcvia.CV.HP.COM (Steven_Tenney) writes:
>
>Also, how does the IRS accept business expenses as far as writing off
>your own labor (assuming you did set up the production of your book
>as a business).  I knew of someone, who owned his own piano store, who
>treated himself as both president of his company as well as a laborer.

Unless they fixed the tax law since 1988 when I was last free-lancing,
it is a LOT more complicated than you think.  At least then, books were
capitalized income, not current income.  That is, you could note all the
expenses that went into producing a book, but you could only charge them
against the actual income produced by THAT book.  Conversely, income from
a book could only be reduced by the expenses on that book, not any other
expense.  This is as opposed to what you might expect, charging the expenses
incurred this year against whatever income you made this year from any source.

Naturally this creates a very complicated accounting problem for the
free-lance writer/publisher, since expenses have to be kept in separate
accounts by project and doled out over possibly years as income comes in.
Various writers groups were trying to get the law changed without much
effect the last I heard...